North Korea to expand nuclear arsenal

The United States has deployed a sophisticated sea-based radar to the ocean east of Japan to track any North Korean ballistic missile launches, a Pentagon official said.
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CHOE SANG-HUN and MARK LANDLER

North Korea is going to put all its nuclear facilities - including its operational uranium-enrichment program and its reactors mothballed or under construction - to use in expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal, sharply raising the stakes in the standoff with the United States and its allies.

The announcement by the North’s General Department of Atomic Energy came two days after the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, said his nuclear weapons were not a bargaining chip and called for expanding his country’s nuclear arsenal in quality and quantity during a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers Party of Korea.

The decision will affect the role of the North’s uranium-enrichment plant in the North’s main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, north of the capital, Pyongyang, a spokesman for the nuclear department told the Korean Central News Agency. It was the first time North Korea said it would use the plant to make nuclear weapons. Since first unveiling it to a visiting US scholar in 2010, North Korea had insisted that it was running the plant to make reactor fuel to generate electricity, though Washington suggested that its purpose was to make bombs.

Saying work will be put into practice without delay, the spokesman also said North Korea would refurbish and restart its mothballed nuclear reactor in Yongbyon. The five-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor had been the main source of plutonium bomb fuel for North Korea until it was shut down under a short-lived nuclear disarmament deal with the United States in 2007.

North Korean engineers are believed to have extracted enough plutonium for six to eight bombs including the devices detonated in 2006 and 2009 in underground nuclear tests from the spent fuel unloaded from the reactor.

It is unknown whether North Korea’s third nuclear test in February used some of its limited stockpile of plutonium or fuel from its uranium-enrichment program, whose scale and history remain a mystery.

SUBTLE SHIFT IN TONE

Kim has recently raised tensions with a torrent of threats to attack the United States and South Korea with pre-emptive nuclear strikes. But this week, he appeared to shift his tone slightly by reiterating that his nuclear weapons were a deterrent that helped his country focus on the more pressing domestic issue of rebuilding the economy.

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Even so, a restarting of the reactor and weapons-producing role for its uranium-enrichment plant would add to growing US concern over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The developments mean that the North would now have two sources of fuel for atomic bombs - plutonium and highly enriched uranium - and that Kim could become more strident in his demands.

In Beijing, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Hong Lei, said China, the North’s main ally, felt regretful about the North’s announcement.

“We have noticed the statement made by the DPRK and feel regretful about it," Hong said Tuesday at a daily briefing with reporters, using the North’s official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. “China urges all parties to remain calm and restrained," he said.

ON A COLLISON COURSE

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said Tuesday that North Korea appears to be on a collision course with the international community, The Associated Press reported. Speaking in Andorra, where he is on an official visit, Ban said the crisis had gone too far and international negotiations were urgently needed.

China’s official Xinhua news agency issued comments from Deputy Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui that did not expressly single out North Korea but nonetheless signalled deepening worry about its actions and the response from the United States and its allies. Zhang told Xinhua that he had met with diplomats from the countries concerned and expressed grave concern over current developments. The report did not identify those countries.

Zhang, whose areas of responsibility include Asian affairs, repeated China’s call for restraint on the Korean peninsula, using more urgent language than his government has tended to use until now.

“We do not want to see war or turmoil break out on the peninsula, and we oppose provocative words and actions by any side, and oppose any side doing harm to the peace and stability of the peninsula and the region," said Zhang. “China strongly urges all sides to exercise calm and restraint, to avoid mutual provocation, and to never take any dangerous actions that worsen the situation."

ECONOMIC RE-FOCUS

In Kim’s speech before the party meeting, the script of which was published in the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Tuesday, he said making the country’s possession of self-defense nuclear weapons permanent was essential to ensuring that the country could focus on rebuilding its economy.

Now that we have become a proud nuclear state, we have gained a favourable ground from which we can concentrate all our finance and efforts in building the economy and improving the peoples lives based on the strong deterrent against war," Kim said, underscoring what his regime has long defined as the fruit of its military first policy. “We must now focus all our resources on building an economically strong nation."

But Kim also kept up his strident tone, saying North Korea should continue to build up its nuclear capabilities as long as the imperialists nuclear blackmail and invasion threat continue, and calling on his soldiers to prepare for a score-settling war against the Americans.

“He is chasing after two rabbits at the same time," said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “On one hand, he is calling for nuclear armament. On the other hand, he is telling his people that his nuclear weapons will bring about economic dividends."

ACUTE ELECTRICITY SHORTAGE

Moving swiftly upon the party’s new strategic line, the country’s atomic energy department said measures were being taken to expand the North’s nuclear deterrent, as well as to build an indigenous nuclear power industry to resolve the country’s acute electricity shortage. The North’s rubber-stamp Parliament, the Supreme People’s Republic, enacted a new law Monday on consolidating the position of nuclear weapons state, official media reported Tuesday.

“North Korea shall take practical steps to bolster up the nuclear deterrence and nuclear retaliatory strike power both in quality and quantity to cope with the gravity of the escalating danger of the hostile forces aggression and attack," the law said. It also said “North Korea shall cooperate for nuclear nonproliferation, depending on the improvement of relations with hostile nuclear weapons states."

North Korea used the perceived threats from the United States, like its joint military drills with South Korea, to justify its nuclear weapons arsenal. “At the same time, it is continuing to expand its nuclear program and raising the fear of proliferation to force Washington to manage and engage it," said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at Sejong Institute.

BRINKMANSHIP WON’T WORK THIS TIME

“The North’s new party line removed any lingering ambiguity over what North Korea might try to do with its nuclear weapons," said a senior South Korean government official, who briefed a group of foreign reporters on President Park Geun-hye’s policy on North Korea on condition that he remain unnamed.

“We now know their real intention," he said. “The picture is clear. What we will do is the combined will of the international community." He added that South Korea, the United States and their allies must employ all means of pressure on North Korea, including not only economic sanctions but also investigations into the North’s human rights abuses. “They are depending on nuclear weapons for their survival, but we must persuade them that there is an alternative and brinkmanship doesn’t work."

North Korea demolished the cooling tower of the old Soviet-era five-megawatt reactor in 2008 to demonstrate its commitment to the 2007 deal with Washington. In return, the US State Department removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

URANIUM ENRICHMENT KEY WORRY

The deal, however, unravelled over differences in nuclear inspections between Washington and the North. And the North has since been making preparations to restart it as well as building a new reactor in Yongbyon, though officials here said the country was still months, if not years, from getting the old, decrepit reactor on line again.

More worrisome to them is uranium enrichment. North Korea publicly acknowledged enriching uranium in 2009, but US officials had suspected enrichment activity in the North as early as 2002. They fear that the enrichment plant unveiled in 2010 is only part of a much bigger, harder to detect and more sustainable program to make nuclear bomb fuel.

North Korea is rich in uranium ores. Unlike the plutonium program, which included a large and easily spotted nuclear reactor, an enrichment plant composed of 1000 centrifuges occupies a 600-square-meter space, small enough to be hidden in one of the estimated 8000 tunnels that North Korea has dug for military purposes across its mountainous terrain, South Korean military officials said.